What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

What is cognitive behavioral therapy? This type of therapy helps you change your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. While its goals seem basic, dig a little deeper and you’ll see that this approach is quite intensive.

What Does Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Do?

You don’t have to spend years going to a psychologist to get results. In fact, it’s a perfectly suitable short-term approach. Experts understand that attitudes and decision-making typically involve thoughts, feelings, and actions. These three facets affect one another.

The way you feel about a situation affects the way you act during it. The way you think about a person colors the way you feel about him or her. However, what happens when one of these three components is off? For example, if you base your feelings on inaccurate thoughts, your actions become inappropriate.

Incorporating the Therapy in Addiction Counseling

Within cognitive behavioral therapy, you work alongside a counselor to examine your perception of certain situations. From there, you revisit how thoughts affected feelings and actions. Within counseling for drug and alcohol addiction, experts recognize that feelings can be at odds with reality. Because your thoughts can’t reconcile the reality and your feelings, your body calls for relief.

The relief you’ve been choosing, so far, has been substance abuse. Depressants that numb, stimulants that help you to be “on,” or painkillers that make you feel good are examples. Getting your thoughts and feelings to harmonize and express appropriate behavior is the challenge. To help you achieve this goal, a counselor works with you in a one-on-one setting.

Additional therapy components include journaling, relaxation, and mindfulness training. Group therapy settings also provide the opportunity to continue the treatment. There, you receive peer feedback and learn from others how to respond in certain contexts. Experiential therapy offers a way of applying newly acquired life skills in real-life situations.

How to Get the Most out of Your Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

To maximize your addiction treatment experience, you need to be open to exploring your behavior patterns. Because this therapy focuses on the present by highlighting distorted patterns from the past, you can make drastic changes. For example, CBT allows you to re-evaluate situations that would tempt you to use and look for other ways of dealing with the stimuli.

Accept the challenges to certain behavioral patterns your therapist might give you. Although it might feel odd at the beginning, you’ll quickly gain momentum in the way you see thought processes change. Do the homework, and don’t be bashful about sharing your insights. Because this therapy works in one-on-one settings as well as in group therapy, it makes sense to use every opportunity.

It’s important to note that this therapy moves at a brisk pace. For some program participants, it may appear as if it’s pulling the rug out from underneath them. There’s nothing wrong with you or your perception. Instead, consider that it highlights how much progress you’re making in a very brief period.

A highly individualized inpatient drug rehab program is the ideal setting for this experience. You can take as much time as you need to explore patterns of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. The availability of counseling experts also makes it possible to deal with situations as they crop up.

Could You or a Loved One Benefit from Substance Abuse Treatment?

How could psychotherapy help you or a loved one to overcome a drug addiction? At Memphis Recovery, you have several therapy options including:

Individual therapy that quickly becomes the core of self-discovery

Group therapy that offers an opportunity to try out some of the new life skills you learn

Family therapy that provides a safe setting to re-establish family bonds